Having been developing and showing off his SatNav application and RISC OS GPS device at recent shows, Chris Hall will be taking visitors off in a new direction at this year’s Southwest Show. The event takes place just four weeks from today, and as well as the GPS device Chris will be launching a new genealogy application, FamTree, which will be available to purchase for £15.00.

As its name suggests, the application builds and displays a family tree. However, rather than working from data previously entered into a rigidly structured database, it instead works from data stored in a more simple manner – the directory structure of your disc or other media. Starting at a directory you choose, it parses the structure below that, with each sub-directory representing a child, containing a number of relevant files and, of course, further sub-directories for subsequent generations.

A round-up of 2017 news that could have been reported on at the time if people had only sent it this way!

With 2017 now behind us, looking back over the RISCOSitory posts for the year might leave people thinking there has been very little activity in the RISC OS world – but in fact it merely means there have been very few posts on the site over the course of the year. This, sadly, is a reflection of the amount of news submitted to RISCOSitory by developers etc, more than anything else, with their news being posted elsewhere.

So, over the last few weeks, I’ve been scouring forums and feeds that have gone unread due to a lack of spare time, and where something has jumped out at me as something I might have reported on, I’ve rounded it up in the snippets post below.Continue reading »

If you can find it, you’ll be able to find out where you are. Or something.

The next RISC OS Users meeting in Bristol will take place on Wednesday, 13th September, in the Hope and Anchor pub, and will run from around 7:00-7:30pm until the pub’s closing time. An informal affair, the meetings are an opportunity for anyone in the area to meet up for a drink and a chat about all things RISC OS, and more besides.

This month, Chris Hall intends to bring along the latest version of his RISC OS-based satellite navigation device,Continue reading »

The Midlands User Group‘s next meeting takes place from 2:00pm on Saturday, 18th March, and the guest speaker this month will be Chris Hall, who will be showing MUG members how to use RISC OS Open‘s Desktop Development Environment to build their own RISC OS ROM image – as well as touching on other uses for the software suite. The place to be is:

The Methodist Church Hall,
Greenhill,
Blackwell,
Bromsgrove,
B60 1BL.

There is a small entrance fee to cover costs, and refreshments will be available.

The next meeting of Bristol RISC OS Users (BRU) will take place on Wednesday, 8th March, at the Hope and Anchor pub in Bristol – and, as ever, anyone with an interest in RISC OS who is in the area is welcome to come along; there are no membership or entry fees.

Running from around 7:30pm until closing time, the meetings are generally informal in nature, and consist of a group of like-minded people meeting up for a chat over a pie1 and a pint2. Continue reading »

A last minute round-up before the bunker is sealed off for a few days!

Later today, the RISCOSitory/Soft Rock Software bunker will be sealed and secured shut while I disappear into the middle of nowhere for my annual mid-February break. Hopefully, there will be no kind of apocalyptic event while I’m away, so the bunker should be open for business again from next weekend.

In the meantime, I’ve had a last minute catch-up on my reading, and found a few things worth mentioning in a final round-up before I set off.Continue reading »

The next meeting of Bristol RISC OS Users (BRU) will take place on Wednesday, 11th January, and this month Chris Hall will be showing off a £6.00 OLED display, sporting a whopping 128×64 pixel resolution and connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero.

This is the latest evolution of Chris’ GPS project, with the display showing the Ordnance Survey grid reference, milepost mileage (which will generally show zero unless you are on or very near the Severn Valley Railway, since this part of the software relates to that), and the time.Continue reading »

With yet another protracted busy period here in the RISCOSitory/Soft Rock Software bunker, it’s time to round up some news that has either been previously missed, or held back until more time was available.Continue reading »

Just the thing for the morning after the night before, and you’ve woken up wondering where on Earth you are!1

Chris Hall has released a new application, provisionally called ‘SatNav’, that can read the signal from a GPS receiver and feed it to other applications capable of understanding and acting on that data. One such application is Sine Nomine’s mapping software RiscOSM, which will then open a map showing your current location.Continue reading »